In perhaps the largest twist of irony ever, my PowerMac is running Linux and my desktop is running OS X.
I have to say, OS X is a lot more pleasant when you're running it on a decent computer. Here are a few of my observations:
First of all, its multimonitor support is second to none. Oh man, I could gush about this all day. Rather than the tacked-on support that Windows has and the meh support that other *nix variants -- and Linux -- have (one desktop environment is flexible, one desktop environment blows, though either way it's a bit of a hassle to get X set up in the first place), OS X has an amazing level of support for it. Rather than dealing with displays as being mere numbers, OS X actually places a resolution and color profile switcher on each display. This might seem like overkill, but if you've ever tried changing the refresh rate on a specific display in any Windows version you'd fall in love (in Windows, you have to click the display and hit advanced -- overall, that feature neither very obvious or friendly). OS X, like KDE (and other *nix environments), also has the ability to change the wallpaper on each screen individually without having to make a special tiled wallpaper like you do in Windows. Another great feature becomes apparent when you change around the arrangement of your monitors. When you click and hold one of the displays down on the arrange dialog, a thick red line appears on the display that's being manipulated. All in all, very intuitive.
In verison 10.4, I believe, Apple finally introduced a feature that allows the user to change around the modifier keys. Fracking finally! There's nothing worse than having to plug in a shitty Apple keyboard (let's just say, with mine, typing "cd " quickly results in "cdd " appearing on the screen for some reason...needless to say, I always used to have a bash alias set up to calm my frustrations with that POS) just to have the command key in the right place.
Screen capping is fairly easy and straightforward. Shift+Command+4 lets you select a region while Shift+Command+3 dumps the entire screen. One nice part about both features is that they dump a PNG file right on the desktop, rather than forcing the user to paste it in Paint or something. Not a big deal, but still a time-saver. One thing that IS rather nice, however, is that on a multimonitor system, Shift+Command+3 stores each display into a seperate PNG.
The Alt-Tab feature (or should I say, Command-Tab) is basically the same as the one in Windows, though the OS X is a wee bit more refined. The icons are much bigger and they can be clicked on. Not bad.
The input system for non-English characters is pretty nice. Rather than having an inconsistent model (i.e. Windows with a US keyboard, X11, etc) it uses a system-wide one. The keys for them aren't as intuitive as the ones in Microsoft Office for Windows but it's still more convenient than memorizing a short list of ALT-codes. For example, let's say I want to type an accented e, as in Pokémon. In Windows, normally I'd type ALT-130 -- the old extended ASCII code for it. In OS X, no matter which program I'm in, ALT-e, e, does it. I personally like the Office 2003 method the best (ALT-', e) but whatever.
The system, overall, feels fairly responsive. It feels a bit more sluggish than Vista does on my mom's laptop but it's nothing to raise a fuss over. The inconsistency with some of the styling in OS X bothers me a bit -- some of it is brushed metal, some of it is smooth metal, and some of it retains the old OS X 10.0/10.1 style. It just feels very mish-mashy to me.
Moving on to brighter things, the font rendering engine used is simply incredible. Best font smoothing I've seen, ever.
The mouse movement is a bit different than in Windows and X. Rather than having a fairly quick-moving pointer with little or no acceleration, OS X has a slow-moving pointer with a high amount of acceleration. It's not hard to get used to it, but going back and forth between OS X and, say, Linux (like I'm doing right now) is weird.
I really don't like iTunes. I hate how they make sweeping changes to the interface with every release (the iTunes bundled with OS X 10.4.6 is quite different from the one in 10.4.8 for whatever reason). The UI is broken for one major reason. It's normally fairly quick (at least on OS X, in Windows it's slow in all aspects [on the same system that I'm running OS X on, to boot]) but that all goes to hell when you try to use the search. Rather than handling the search like any logically designed program would, by either waiting for the user to finish typing or waiting until they press ENTER, iTunes constantly searches as the user types, making the experience nothing but SLOW and TEDIOUS (and I didn't even add my entire music collection). If you're a quick typist you'll be sitting there waiting while the program repeatedly searches. A second or two of lag might not seem like much, but if you go right from the keyboard to the scroll bar you're forced to wait while the system catches up. For example, I was in the mood to listen to System of a Down tonight (currently listening to: Tentative), so I started up iTunes and typed "System of a Down" into the search bar. After I finished typing I got to watch the window continually refresh for about 3-4 seconds. Wonderful. Had I been using Winamp or Amarok I would have been
listening to the music by the time iTunes caught up. But anyway, onto better and brighter things.
Exposé is a wonderful feature. Its main ability is spreading all of your open windows out over the screen and letting you click the one you want. I like. Like everything else, it respects multimonitor settings by keeping the windows on the appropriate monitors.
One problem with Exposé, however, is configuring a mouse button. Can someone please tell me what the hell THIS is supposed to be:
I don't know about you guys, but I sure don't have a 16-button mouse, nor would I want one. What's even better is when I had OS X 10.4.10 on my PPC PowerMac. It wasn't happy with only supporting 16 buttons. Oh, no, that machine gave me the selection between one of
64 mouse buttons (and I was actually using it on proper Apple hardware, like a good boy). How exactly does something like that slip past the QA team? :/
I had a few issues with hardware. I had to grab a network card driver for my onboard 3c940 (thankfully, someone ported over the Linux skge driver that I use in that OS...whew) and a set of hardware IDs so that my video card would work with Apple's drivers. My main sound card (SB Live!) isn't supported but my onboard AC97 is, so I have to swap my speakers around when I want to hear anything. The network card was easy to get working but I had issues getting the video card drivers to work. After I got the right set they went right in, thankfully. None of this is Apple's fault, of course, it's just the cruel reality of play with OS X on systems that aren't "supposed" to run it.
Whew...that was a lot more than I'd intended to type. I think Imma play with this a bit more in the next few days.
Long story short: OS X runs a HELL of a lot better on Intel processors than it does on PowerPCs (I've used both G4s and G5s and OS X's performance on both is just crap).
Edit: Almost forgot to include one very nice feature: read-only NTFS support. Very convenient, I'd be very unhappy (and surprised, what with Boot Camp and all) if this wasn't put in.
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